Leveraging Consumers’ Showrooming Behaviour – A Supply Chain Perspective

Abstract

With the mushrooming of new technologies and changing customers' shopping habits, it becomes absolutely necessary to understand the reasons and appreciate the customers' needs and preferences in an optimal way. Showrooming and Webrooming are the new terms which are making rounds in the prevailing multi-channel customer centric business model. In both these cases, consumers can interact with retailers across channels anytime, anywhere and at their convenience. Due to adversity of products and brands, shoppers of today hardly make an instant purchase decision. They would rather search and evaluate products either online or in-store. Though intense research seems to be happening with the focus on identifying ways to curb this behaviour, it has actually become a challenge to the back-end players of the supply chain, mainly the physical distribution. This study attempts to understand those dimensions of service quality of physical distribution; the dimensions of service loyalty that has an influence on showrooming behaviour of consumers’ of electronic goods in order to determine those factors of physical distribution service quality that has influence on service loyalty. The study is focused on the customers of electronic goods like mobiles, laptops and other electronic accessories.